Series: Wisconsin In The 2016 Presidential Election

Political discontent in rural areas of the U.S. is regularly cited as a major factor in Donald Trump’s victory and Congressional and statehouse gains by other Republican candidates in the 2016 elections.

Donald Trump's presidential victory in Wisconsin, the first time a Republican candidate has won the state's electoral votes since 1984, was the result of a complex shift in voting patterns in counties both large and small.

In the world of political polling, the Marquette University Law School Poll is considered the best in Wisconsin. When a new poll is released with a new round of results, political journalists across the state avidly follow it and tweet it out point-by-point.

The 2016 presidential election results took many people of all political stripes by surprise. It will be a while before it is fully understood why figures released by many reputable state and national polls were off, some by a wide margin. Until then, history may offer some potential explanations.

In 1948, four national polling firms infamously predicted that Thomas Dewey would win the presidential election by a comfortable 5 to 15 percentage points rather than the 4.4 percentage point victory won by President Harry Truman. This error brought the young polling industry to its knees.

As the nation woke up to a new president-elect on Nov. 9, Kathy Cramer was as stunned as just about anyone who analyzes U.S. politics for a living, and especially those people with confidence in the accuracy of public opinion polls.

Wisconsin has been a battleground state in presidential elections for decades, but over time, the political landscape has shifted. Voting patterns are increasingly becoming defined by geography, with population density serving as a marker of partisan preference.

As Wisconsin heads into a hotly contested presidential primary election for both major parties, WPR has looked back at years when the state's voters played an important role in selecting parties' nominees.

The 2012 Republican presidential primary marked 100 years of Wisconsinites electing delegates to the major party conventions in open primaries — a system the state pioneered. That year's cycle also brought an increasingly rare spotlight to what is now a late-primary state.